Image (not from entry) from, under the headline "Vladimir Putin's judo prowess called into question amid accusations 'phony' fights staged to bolster macho image"
Paul Goble, Windows on Eurasia
Staunton, February 7 – Many think that Vladimir Putin’s penchant for cruelty can be explained by time in the KGB, Kristina Kurchab-Redlikh says; but there have been many with that background such as Yevgeny Primakov or Sergey Stepashin who also served in the organs but were not like that at all.
Kurchab-Redlikh, who was known as “the Polish Anna Politkovskaya” during her time as a journalist in Russia (1990-2004), has now written an 800-page biography of the Kremlin leader in which she says the answer to this Putin mystery is to be found in his earliest years (belsat.eu/ru/news/u-putina-bylo-uzhasnoe-detstvo-intervyu-s-avtorom-knigi-o-glave-rossii/).
Those years in fact were very different and far more difficult that Putin’s own airbrushed account, she says. He was born in the Urals in the village of Ochor not in Leningrad as he has always insisted. Moreover, Putin was the product of an out of wedlock situation, one his mother ended when she found out that the father was married to someone else.
Leaving the future Kremlin leader with her relatives, his mother went to work in Central Asia where she met a Georgian, fell in love, married him and moved to his homeland. She asked the relatives to send Vladimir to her but, according to Kurchab-Redlikh, “there began a real hell for the child.”
Initially, things went well; but the Georgian father wasn’t happy about the fact that Vladimir was born out of wedlock. And so it happened, the Polish journalist says, that the young Putin “had to defend not only himself but also his mother.” It was there that he began to learn martial arts.
Putin and his mother then fled back to her home area of the Urals where there were relatives of hers who had “sometime lived in Leningrad and who lost both sons, one before the war and the second during the Leningrad blockade.” She remarried a Russian but the future leader didn’t get along with him either.
Putin’s second step-father who lived in Leningrad loved him in his way but also beat him from the time the youngster could remember. This man had been a veteran of the organs and had fought in Finland, “but this is not important. Vova immediately understood that first of all one must defend oneself to the end and second to lie, lie, lie and lie again.”
It is that set of experiences, Kurchab-Redlikh says, that explain the Putin of today. He is the only leader who “can lie so masterfully. He lies when looking you in the eyes on any theme. But note that first he never during his election campaigns takes part in any conversations or any debates.”
And after his first few years of public life, he has arranged things so that he doesn’t have to deal with an inconvenient question directly. When someone does manage to pose one, however, Putin “answers as he likes but you do not have the chance for a follow up.”
Kurchab-Redlikh says that the last few pages of her book consist simply “of the names of people [Putin] has sent to the cemetery.” His criminal activities including dealing in drugs started when he came to Leningrad after serving as a KGB officer in East Germany. “Then the murders occurred of which there were many.”
At present, one can’t prove anything, the biographer says, “but all the [available] facts indicate that Sobchak ended in the cemetery not without [Putin’s] involvement.” It is also the case that the FSB and its agents, “Chechen traitors,” were behind the explosions at the apartment houses in 1999.
No comments:
Post a Comment